Miasma

NYT.  The difficulties in moving the music business online isn't really about copyright theft.  It is mostly about business models:  who gets paid when you move from a pay-per-sip system of CDs (scarcity) to a pay-per-subscription system of online downloads (abundance).  The problem is that ownership of music is a convoluted mess, and everyone who has a stake wants to take the lion's share at the expense of all others.

"It's as if Franz Kafka designed this system and employed Rube Goldberg as his architect," said Rob Glaser, the chairman of MusicNet, which is part-owned by his company, RealNetworks, along with AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and the EMI Group. "It's full of tripwires."

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

6:25:21 PM